Affiliate disclosure
How this site makes money, stated plainly, in one page you can read in three minutes.
By Sawyer V. · Published · Last updated
The short version
Chord & Case earns a commission when you buy something through one of our links. It costs you nothing extra. It does not change which instruments we recommend or the order they appear in.
The Amazon Associates relationship
Chord & Case is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. We earn from qualifying purchases.
In practice: when you click one of our buy buttons and then purchase something on Amazon, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. The price you pay is exactly the same as it would have been if you had gone to Amazon directly. Our tracking identifier is fafchordandcase-20, and it is attached to every product link on this site.
What this does not change
Which instruments we recommend. Picks are chosen against the published four-band framework on how we pick, using manufacturer specifications and arithmetic. Commission rate is not an input to that process.
The order they appear in. Roundups are segmented by who is playing and then ranked by how the specifications serve that player. A cheaper instrument that serves the reader better is the top pick, and frequently is.
What we say about them. Every pick on this site carries a “what it is not good at” section and every roundup names at least one thing to skip. The entire “where overspending starts” band exists to argue against spending more money, which is the opposite of what a commission would incentivize.
What we do not accept
Free products. None. Not for review, not as samples, not as gifts.
Sponsored placements. None. No manufacturer has paid to appear on this site, and none can.
Paid links. We do not sell links, and we do not accept payment to add, remove or reorder a recommendation.
If any of that ever changes, this page changes first and the change is dated.
How our links work
Every outbound product link on this site routes through our own redirect at /go/ before sending you to the retailer. That lets us count how many people click each recommendation, which is how we know which pages are useful. The redirect adds no cost, no tracking of you personally, and no delay you would notice.
Every affiliate link is marked with rel="sponsored nofollow", is labeled #ad where it appears, and opens in a new tab so you do not lose the page you were reading. The /go/ routes are excluded from search engines.
Prices
Prices are fetched live from the retailer and displayed with the date they were checked. As of this page load that date is January 1, 1970.
Where we do not have a current price, the button says “check price” rather than showing you an old number. There is no code path on this site that can display a hardcoded price — that is enforced in software, not left to whoever wrote the page. Prices change constantly and the retailer’s page is always the authority.
Other retailers
At the moment, Amazon is the only retailer we have a commercial relationship with. Where we link to a manufacturer’s own site — usually to cite a specification — we earn nothing from it, and those links are not marked as ads because they are not ads.
If we join another retailer’s program in future, this page will say so, and the links will be marked the same way.
Questions
Email info@chordandcase.com or use the contact form. Our editorial policy covers corrections and how we handle a pick that gets worse.
Chord & Case is published by Fathom & Foundry.